Richard Wolff: The Economics of Collapsing Empires – Sanctions and Wars (Transcript)

So we tend to have one empire rising and becoming the next one. And in that process of decline of one and rise of another. Nothing is more common than two things.

One, the people in the declining empire deny that that is happening. It is often and for example, here in the United States right now, unthinkable for millions of people, whatever else they may agree or disagree on, the collapse of the American empire doesn’t arise. I give you an example. Last November when we had our presidential election, neither Mr. Trump nor Mr. Biden, nor Ms. Harris ever said one word about a declining empire that does not exist in those political parties. No speech can be written that refers to it on and on and on. It is a taboo topic.

And the second thing that’s very common is the effort made by the declining empire to postpone or delay its further decline and to do so by impeding the rise of whatever is coming next, a multinational arrangement or a new empire, or an ambiguous situation as to which of those two would will emerge.

Israel as an Anachronistic Example

And that, I think, is what you’re seeing, in my judgment. Israel is like a spectacular example of something that is utterly anachronistic. It’s a phenomena out of date, out of time. The last 150 years have been, if they’ve been anything, a period of anti colonial transformation in which the majority of the world’s people have struggled painfully and difficult and it took a long time to undo the colonialization by Western Europe, North America and Japan.

And Israel is the outstanding remainder. Here we have a settler colonialism in the 21st century. After a century and a half of anti colonialism trying to establish and to expand a settler colonialism, and it finds the whole world organized against it. Which should have brought them to the idea, why would we be doing something that the whole world votes against in every United nations vote it has ever taken, not to speak of all the other ways?

And why would the United States line itself up with this small country doing something so a or anti historical? Well, the suggestion is they have something in common, and I think they do. That the United States sees in Israel its own project, its own project of trying to hold on to what is unsustainable.

And that’s why there is such a level of gloom and depression and desperation and dogged determination to keep doing this. Because there’s an awareness, however diminish, that history is moving rapidly in the other direction. The combination of the ancient settler colonialism project in Israel and the explosion of the People’s Republic of China, economically, politically, militarily, that has got to be a contrast that is stunning.

And I know, as an American, and I have my connections here, that the people at the very top are very aware of that contradiction. The China story on the one hand and the Israel story on the other. You even have in the last 24 hours, the emergence of a strong argument here in the United States, inside the Democratic Party and even inside the Republican Party, that the United States has now, I will quote you, has now paid its debt to Israel. It has discharged its obligation to Israel. Another quote. We can now walk away from from this and concentrate on China because we are no longer hanging on to the Israelis. They now have to do it for themselves.

Which is of course absurd, because never have the Israelis been more in more difficulty relative to the enemies they have made than they are right now.

GLENN DIESEN: So.

RICHARD WOLFF: But it shows you that even the extreme right wing which endorsed the attack on Iran wants it to be the end of that whole story. And that will help explain the almost pathetic way that the American leadership, other than Trump, he’s out of control. But the American leadership was. Wants this to be understood as an attack only on the nuclear facilities, the three cities, not for regime change, not against Islam. No, no, no, no, no, no, please, no, no. Now, let us please tell you the very limited meaning of what we’ve just done. That, that won’t work very well. But the desperation behind it, people should see.

Communication Problems and Narrative Inconsistencies

GLENN DIESEN: There’s a. Seems to be a difficulty in maintaining the. A common narrative. That is initially, when Israel attacked Iran, Marubia went out and said, we had nothing to do with it. And then, of course, Trump comes out and undermined this idea. And now we saw J.D. Vance arguing that, you know, we are not at war with Iran, we’re at war with its nuclear weapons program. You know, interesting use of the language. But then Trump comes out tweeting that regime change wouldn’t be that bad of idea. You know, make Iran great again, you know, get rid of the government. So there is, there are some communication problems, it seems, within.

But, but, but the pivoting from, you know, not being part of this and now, yeah, going for. If getting rid of the government. It is quite interesting how, how they’re able to use the language you did meant contrast or the difference between a rising hegemon and a declining one.

Rising vs. Declining Hegemons

And what is interesting with a rising hegemon is at least an economic one, is that it’s often able to portray itself as a benign hegemon by pursuing a liberal economic or, well, open market system. Because it’s. If you have this concentration of wealth, then an open, open international economy means that the world will use your leading technologies, they will use your leading industries, you will control the land and maritime corridors with, you know, military and navy. They will use your bank, your currency and your payment system.

And, you know, so there’s an incentive towards this because, you know, if there’s anyone sowing fear and distrust, then they will pursue strategic autonomy and decouple from this hegemonic system, which is why you use the word emulate. That others would like to become like it is a source of envy. But in economic decline, though, you see often more reliance on militarism and sanctions to hold the system together. Do you see it the same way?

The Rise and Fall of Free Trade Ideology

RICHARD WOLFF: Absolutely. I mean, the rise of Britain is the rise of the whole concept of free trade, the endless effort, starting with David Ricardo, if not earlier, to demonstrate how you can conceptualize the economy in which free trade is the best policy for everyone. I remember being. I have my PhD in economics. I’m sitting in the classrooms and, and I’m a product of American elite education. So I was sitting in Harvard, Stanford and Yale, arguably the three best universities in the country.

And my professors in each place said the same thing to us, giving us demonstrations mathematically, geometrically, empirically, historically, every way you want. Why free trade is absolutely the best possible arrangement. And it was so dominant that it was used as a way of explaining why the British became the British Empire, which is a bit of a stretch, but they did that and why now? The United States was if anything a bigger empire because it was even more committed.

And this is especially true in the period of the second half of the 20th century when the Americans were replacing the British everywhere. Asia, Africa, Latin America. Well, the British had never been in Latin America, but that was a deal the British gave the United States back in the 19th century. You can have South America, but the reality is, look at the irony.

Neoliberal free tradeism is in complete disarray now as an ideology, as a policy, it is rejected, it is ignored, it is denounced in various ways. It is by large sections of the population, by blamed for the problems America has today. We don’t want free movement of people. That’s the anti immigrant hysteria. We don’t want free trade. The leader of the free world is a man who puts tariffs literally everywhere as fast as he can. I mean you could not caricature the rejection of free trade that this is performing and then the completion of the irony which makes your point.

China is the, is the great champion of globalization. Says so. They make those statements all the time. They’re not against. Oh no, they don’t want tariffs, they want free trade. They want what the British wanted in the 19th century, they want in this century. And the British are running away from that. Not that they matter anymore, but all of the old champions of the free trade are busily learning arguments which if you’re familiar with the history of all of this, you will know that for example, Liszt and other German thinkers in the 19th century were as busy denouncing free trade because it held back the German Virtschaft Funde and they wanted to be able to control their situation.

And that has always been a much bigger theme of German economic thinking. And that’s not because of something peculiar to the German language or, or culture. It has to do with exactly the point you’re making.

The Return of Fair Trade

GLENN DIESEN: Yeah, that was the 19th century when was common to refer to the free trade imperialism. And the alternative to free trade was fair trade. It was said, and I find it interesting that this concept has made its way back. I heard Trump say fair trade a few times and I thought about industrial capitalism of Henry Clay, Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich List and the like. So it is, I guess, the era of economic liberalism is drawing to an end.

RICHARD WOLFF: There is a. You might enjoy a further irony. The term fair trade has actually in the last 50 years been a term of the left in America, in the United States. And Mr. Trump, because he doesn’t know or care, was borrowing this term from the left. Let me give you an example.

In many parts of the United States, if you go into a grocery store looking for some kind of food, coffee or sugar, you will be offered on the shelf something called the product, whatever it is, and then fair trade brand of the product. And you’ll discover for a few pennies more per pound of coffee or sugar or whatever you are told. This will now go to treating the peasant in wherever the this product comes from better.

So if you believe that they should be given a decent livelihood in Latin America, where they make the coffee or where they make the sugar, or where they make the fill in the blank, you can buy and willingly pay a higher price for what is called fair traded items. They don’t have the phrase free trade, but. But the rest is free trade. This is fair trade. So it’s the same people that Mr. Trump denounces as Marxist, socialists, leftists, fascists, because he puts all those are synonyms for him. He denounces them, he took from them the whole concept of fair trade.

And again, the beauty of ignorance, you uses it to support these people in the United States. He likes President McKinley, a person who most people who are asked to name American president would never remember. I mean, he has zero importance in American history, but he for a while supported tariffs in the end of the 19th century. So somebody told Trump this. He aligned himself because it was important to align yourself with somebody in the American past. He can’t do Lincoln because his white supremacists would be very unhappy. So he chose McKinley, which was smart because no one ever knows, ever heard of Mr. McKinley or has the vaguest idea what he is. He stands for nothing.

The Economics of Declining Empire: Infrastructure and Social Investment

GLENN DIESEN: That would be a nice continuation. Well, another, I guess in the contrast between a rising and declining hegemon would be that a rising one would be making a lot of investments into a healthy society that is spent on health care, educating the public, building infrastructure, things I guess often for the common good. But we see some contradictions here, internal contradictions which aren’t really addressed or managed.

And well, if we look at the United States today, but not only the U.S. we also find others where this is not really invested in infrastructure to some extent, not in healthcare, not in education. So in other words, there seems to be less in investments in the future.

And now if you would contrast this with China, it’s very different now. We tend to always look at things as, you know, they’re communist Chinese versus US Capitalists. But the America, again, if you go back to 19th century America, was making heavy investments in these things as well. Infrastructure, health, education and I guess common goods for society.

RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah, well, I think the contrast is as stark now as I think it has ever been. Let me give you some examples. I’m a professor. I’ve been a professor in the American university system all of my adult life. When I began, most of my students who got a PhD, which is the highest credential we give, would go on to become academics in their own right. They would become professors in other universities.

Now the majority of my students, and I still teach, cannot find academic jobs or if they do, they are inadequate. They don’t pay enough money to live. So they will mix a part time academic job teaching a couple of courses with a non academic job in order to feed the family in order to literally get by. Very stark.

We close colleges here in the United States. Every so often. I am besieged by former students who have been professors a few years and the college or university where they are has closed and they need me to help them find another position by writing letters of recommendation and all the usual things that we do in this society.

So yes, and look at Mr. Elon Musk brought in to simply fire tens of thousands of people across all kinds of government agencies, including the Department of Education, the infrastructure building departments of all kinds. This is not affordable. This is said it’s not affordable given the fact that we have priorities which include military.

That part of the budget, for example, that is being decided right now in the US Senate, the part of the budget that goes for defense is $100 billion more roughly than it was last year. So that’s a priority. At the same time, our government is running 2 to 3 trillion dollars deficits per year. That is a serious priority to get that down. Result, economize on every social program there is and that includes health, education, you name it, it’s all being cut back.

And this is explained as required by the economy. They don’t run away from that. That is required by the economic reality of a national debt that is now 130% of the GDP. By the level of deficits we are in the middle of.

And so, yes, everything you say is not being contextualized as a problem of a declining empire. No, no, no. The taboo against that means it’s never explained in those terms. It is instead explained as the specific requirements of the historical moment.

And by the way, not that it’s the major cause, but one of the things that makes the attack on Iran useful is that it reinforces the military dangers and the military requirements of the moment. It will be pointed to, to shut up anybody who questions the amount of money being shifted to the military and away from the infrastructure and from what people need.

It will be the number one political effort of the Democratic Party in the next 18 months to the next election. It will be a relentless effort to suggest that we could be militarily safe and do the social programs. And that if you vote for Democrats, you’ll get that. And that hopefully, they hope, will undercut the belief of people that they have to support the Republicans despite the decline in social programs because of the military necessity, because they don’t allow any other issues in. That will probably be the campaign.

Or to say the same thing in simpler terms, whoever the Democratic candidate will be will say, I’m better than Trump and the Republicans because I’m not as bad as they are on these issues. That’s it. There is no positive program. There is no social analysis. It’s, you got a choice between bad and worse. I’m merely bad. They are worse.

Democratic Despotism and Political Stagnation

GLENN DIESEN: Reminds me a bit about a chapter in the second volume of Alexis de Tocqueville. He writes about, I think it was a Democratic Despotism is the name of the chapter. And we say part of the theme as well is that the democracies have more ability to go further into this before they meet resistance.

Because if you have a failed policy by the government, you always have the assumption that, well, it can be changed at the ballot box, that you have this control, which you don’t really have. But that’s why it’s also interesting. I mean, the people who are sick of the former party’s wars and economic mismanagement, you know, they’re criticized by the opposition, then the opposition takes power and they just switch roles. But it is interesting that, yeah, the policies don’t change.

RICHARD WOLFF: However, just a footnote to that, the polling here in the United States. And I understand all the problems with polling, but the polling shows one thing that I think is important that most people do not, in my judgment, give enough attention to, and that is that yes. Mr. Trump’s popularity is going down pretty sharply and pretty much across many different polls. So I’m not relying on one.

CNN here does a nice job of gathering half a dozen different polls and then giving the results of the average of all of them. So it’s clear that in the latest number, which came out today, 42% of Americans approve of Mr. Trump and 56% of Americans disapprove of Mr. Trump.

But here’s what the polling also shows. A record number of people disapprove of the Democratic Party because it is so weak as an opposition. In other words, what’s really remarkable and what points to the future is that never have the conditions been better for a breaking out of the duopoly of those two parties in our political system.

And this is understood above all by the Bernie Sanders left wing in this country. They’re called populists. Bizarre language, but that’s it. The populist wing of the Democratic Party is the most likely beneficiary of this.

And the greatest risk is that the Republican Party will split because of this, that the disaffection of a whole part of the right wing, which, by the way, is not happy with the events in Iran, that this is the wing that doesn’t want to support Israel much anymore, doesn’t want war, responds to Mr. Trump when he says no more war and is very, very upset now by the fact that the wars are not going away is going to hurt him politically.

I’m very interested in the polls of the coming days and weeks to see the impact on that. But that political situation is now changing. And if you add to that that Mr. Trump has been unable to stop the rising prices. They’re not rising quickly, but they continue to rise. And for most Americans, that’s the problem. It’s not the rate at which it goes, it’s that it keeps going. And he hasn’t been able to solve that problem.

And most of the financial press, left wing, right wing and in the middle, believes we’re going to have a recession in the second half of this year or next year or both. You put all that together and then the Republican Party has got some major difficulties.

Scapegoating and Military Escalation

GLENN DIESEN: Well, you mentioned on the topic of Iran, I guess that’s also a good indication of a struggling empire. That is the scapegoating. The once the good times appear to be behind and there’s a decline, then, you know, one usually goes look for who has robbed the empire of its greatness. So, you know, it can be internal, some minorities or whatever it might be. But it’s also often external powers.

So I guess the external would be obvious here. That is, Trump would say China, who has, you know, come and taken our jobs. But in the combination of increased militarism, this is also problematic. The US now is fighting the war indirectly, though, against Russia. But now I think it would probably prefer to fight indirectly with Iran.

But given that Israel is a much weaker proxy, or compared to fighting a larger Iran than Ukraine will be with, you know, it’s 35 million people, which you can draw on their human resources. Yeah. The US thinks appears to get much more directly involved in the fight against Iran.

But, you know, you can probably add more countries coming on this list besides Russia, Iran, they’re also talking now openly about a war with China. Is this, do you see unlikely, a graceful decline of empire here, that is to walk away from it, you know, reduced empire to save the republic? Or do you see the US going fully into this in terms of trying to knock out rising adversaries, regional adversaries at least?

The Political Consequences of Economic Decline

RICHARD WOLFF: Well, let’s go through it a little bit. You’re absolutely right. The decline has produced our politics. The decline should be understood. The statistics are all there for this, that the last 40 years have seen a dramatic redistribution of wealth and income in the United States from the bottom, in the middle, to the top, and particularly to the very big top, the spectacular top. Elon Musk and Bezos, who has commandeered Venice for his wedding this weekend and all of that.

But the major victims, this is important, were white male unionized manufacturing workers. That subgroup, a very big subgroup, has really been savage. The factories are gone. The deindustrialization here is remarkable. And nobody helped them. Nobody even spoke about it.

We were all caught up in the east coast and west coast celebration of neoliberal free trade globalization, which first the Republicans, but then the Democrats with equal enthusiasm embraced as a wonderful, necessary, permanent commitment of the United States.

It produced a peculiar kind of, you might almost say torture, political torture, because you’re telling tens of millions of Americans, white male unionized workers, that the economy is in wonderful shape. It is very healthy, it is growing, GDP is growing, stock market is booming. And the only problem is you. The only problem is you.

And so it isn’t an economic problem. There’s nothing wrong with capitalism. You failed. You don’t have the right skills, you don’t have the right work experience, you don’t have the right attitude. You don’t have the right discipline, whatever it is, it’s all you. So feel really bad about yourself and go get drunk and if you’re younger, go shoot up with an opioid and kill yourself. Which huge numbers of Americans have been doing. 100,000 a year on opioids destroy themselves. It’s a remarkable story.

The Demagogue’s Strategy

Okay, in this situation, the demagogic politician, e.g., Mr. Trump and others like him see, correctly, a wonderful opportunity. There’s an enormous part of the population that is very, very angry, very bitter, very hostile, very full of the rage of a destroyed circle. They can’t make a living. Their children have prospects of nothing. Their community, half the stores in the city are boarded up because they are defunct. The government of the state has no money and therefore cannot and does not help them, et cetera.

Meanwhile, over the last 15, 20 years, or 30 even, we have had two interesting movements. The movement of black and brown people who don’t want to be second class citizens, as they have always been, and the women who don’t want to be second class citizens, as they have always been.

And so the demagogue puts these elements together. Very creative. He goes to the white male factory worker and says, you’re the victim of what those elite politicians, Democrats mostly have been doing. Pandering to women, pandering to black and brown people by giving them preferences, like the diversity movement, et cetera, et cetera. And their worst crime is bringing in the immigrants to vote for them so they can continue to favor everyone else at your expense.

This was a genius. You got to take your head off because if you’re going to do a political analysis, this is the way to do it. And in he comes, Mr. Trump, and what does he do? He mixes together Christian fundamentalism, that’s who these white men are, white supremacy, that’s what’s lurking in the background of that population anyway. And focus it against people who can’t vote against him. Immigrants, they don’t have the vote. The only people he can’t win over on this system are the women. And they voted against him in the last election relative to other groups. That’s our situation.

The Scapegoating of Immigrants

And the demonization and the scapegoating of the immigrant is completely crazy unless you understand what its function is. I mean, the United States is an economy of 330 million people. Undocumented immigrants here are 10, maybe 12 million. That’s all. And they work very hard. Their crime rate is less than that of native born American. They don’t fit the stereotype at all. They haven’t got the power they couldn’t possibly explain America’s difficulty, but they are useful. Why?

Because they speak to the suffering of those white male unionized factory workers and carefully avoid any blame whatsoever on the employer class. They never say that the reason your job left Ohio and moved to Shanghai is because the employer decided to do that. No, instead we have a vague articulation. The Chinese took the job. No, they didn’t.

It’s very clear how the job went to China. It’s very clear that if you lost your job to a machine, it’s because your employer made that substitution. And it’s very clear that employers encouraged the immigrants to come because they would work in poorer conditions and for less money than you would.

And the workers know everything I just said, but their suffering is so great and the absence of the Democratic Party willing to say what I just said, other than Mr. Sanders, he gets close, but other than him, they don’t see no one. So they have to turn to the scapegoat they’ve got, which is the Democrats who are linked to the immigrants to support their votes to hurt us.

And as long as he can do that, and as long as the Democratic Party is equally committed not to blame corporate America at all for anything, then they will lose. And Mr. Trump or whoever comes next will win. And at this point, if you ask me, then I think this right wing will continue to win. And what they just did to Iran will not be sufficient to undo this. There will have to be more horrible events or it’s not going to change.

The Modern Repeal of the Corn Laws

GLENN DIESEN: Sometimes this, what happened in the late 80s or beginning of the 90s feels like a second repeal of the corn laws. That is because, you know, the repeal of the corn was often recognized to be, you know, introduction of a liberal economics. That is, the British would allow foreign powers to export agricultural products to Britain if they would open up their markets for industrial goods. So obviously that would allow Britain to saturate their markets and make their infant industries uncompetitive to the British.

But we saw something similar, though, in the beginning of the 90s. That is, the new trade agreements which came forth was strengthening, for example, intellectual property rights for American tech, but also in favor of global finance. But in return, it would open up a lot of manufacturing. So in other words, the tech and the global finance concentrates in the US and the Chinese and the others of the world gets to do the manufacturing and the production.

Now it’s a good move for the United States as one entity. That is, it gets the high, high end of the global supply chains where there’s high revenue and also high dependence, which can create political dependencies too. However, the problem is within the country though, there’s, you know, because it’s not just numbers. It’s, as you said, human beings.

So the East Coast, west coast thrive under globalization, but a bit like the 19th century, by the way, in the first wave of globalization is you would see then within the country some people would benefit and others would lose very big, as you said. A good indicator obviously, is when people begin to die in this opium crisis as well.

The Condescending Response to Economic Displacement

And yeah, I think this is where a lot of the appeal as well came from Trump, as you said. I think he correctly identified the problem which is told the people who lost, who did not gain from globalization, that you’re losers and you’re the backwards ones who either couldn’t make it where you were or as I remember reading an article once, they should all the solution to their problem is you hold. They should just move less terrible places.

I mean, it is extraordinary how the condescending hatred of these people. So I can understand fully, I would also vote for the guy who recognizes what has happened to you.

Finding Solutions for America’s Crisis

But I guess my last question to you though, is how would you fix this? How do you. Because it’s easy to see the disease, but obviously the people who come and present the disease, often they don’t have the right medicine. Again, if the solution is just a little bit more of warfare and a little bit more debt, I mean, how can you fix the troubles that America is in now?

Because even America’s worst enemies, I don’t think would benefit to see America collapse. You know, this is. This would be too destabilizing. Everyone would like to see a not. Yeah, a moderate US, you know, one among other great powers, a source of stability, you know, ideally. So how. How would you fix the difficult situation as the US seems to have exhausted its empire and it doesn’t really know yet where to land?

The Path Forward: Political Realignment and Economic Transformation

RICHARD WOLFF: Well, I don’t mean to disappoint you, but in my judgment at this point, that’s what we’re facing. We’re facing either a greater or lesser continuation of this current situation as long as it is tolerable.

And let me stop for a moment. I know we’re running out of time, but I’m wondering really, as I think the whole world is not just what the Iranian government will, how it will respond to all of this, but how the BRICS, of which Iran is a member, the Russians and the Chinese, with whom the Iranians clearly have all kinds of arrangements made.

If what I understand is true from the International Atomic Energy Commission that the purified uranium that was supposed to be in those three cities had actually left the country before because the Iranians understood the risks of what they actually have, all that uranium and the United States wouldn’t know where to bomb because don’t know where it is.

If that’s true, then you see the open ended range of possibilities here. Iran will be incentivized to get nuclear weapons now more than it was before this strike. And it may have much of what it needs to do that. And Russia and China must draw the logical conclusions of what the United States is prepared to do. And on and on and on.

So the grim is what many people feel, and rightly so, that there is very little sign here in the United States of any political leadership in either of the two parties willing to raise even marginally important questions, let alone the fundamentals.

Signs of Political Change in America

So my feeling is we’re going to hobble along. We’re going to have ever thinner excuses for the warfare that Mr. Trump is stimulating, not bringing to an end. There seems no end in Ukraine. Now we have Iran. Israel continues to do what it does in Gaza. The whole world is building up a level of antipathy to all of this that is going to blow up in all kinds of ways.

Here’s the only thing that I see as a possibility. The populist wing of the Democratic Party that is Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other groupings like that. I should mention, for example, that I’m sitting here in New York City in the final days of the election of a new mayor of New York City. And New York City being the biggest city, the mayor is an important position.

And right now the number two candidate, almost at a par with the number one is a man named Mamdani, last name, who identifies himself as a socialist. And he is going to get millions of votes and may defeat Andrew Cuomo, who is a pillar of the center of the Democratic Party. That is a sign of change.

There are several members of the City Council that runs New York who are socialists by self definition. We haven’t seen that for 75 years in American history, including New York City history. So something is shifting and shifting considerably if that wing were to dare to declare it can no longer go along with a party whose first priority is pandering to the billionaire donors that run the political system.

The Billionaire Government

I want to remind you that Mr. Trump, wanting to please the masses, arranged in his inauguration that behind him did not sit the Supreme Court justices or the leaders of the politics he had lined up behind him, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeffrey Bezos and Bezos’s wife to be spent a listing as if to emphasize, I am the government of these people.

They produce nothing. They are all financiers of one kind or another. Right? So he is forever stuck with them and they with him.

A Model for Peaceful Transition

So this would be the moment for the populace to say everything you and I have just discussed. This is a declining empire. We’re going to face it. We’re going to sit down with the Iranians, we’re going to sit down with the Chinese, and we’re going to work out a way to live together on this planet.

And our model is Britain and the United States. In the 19th century, when the United States broke away, the British decided to go to war. And that was the War of 1776 that we celebrate on the 4th of July every year in the United States. To the surprise of everyone, the British were defeated in 1812. They tried again and they were defeated again.

And they even wobbled during the American Civil War with whether to join the north or to go with the South. But basically by the middle of the 19th century, the deal was done. It was probably done after the War of 1812. The United States would get Latin America and Britain would take the rest of the world. And on that basis, they never went to war again.

Okay, so that’s the model, very American. And we’re now going to use it and we’re going to end the terror. Everybody feels about American military adventures.

The Potential for Political Reorganization

This would be to throw down the gauntlet. It would be a different economic program, a different political program, a different military program. It would cut the military budget so that we are in line with the rest of the world rather than have spend more than the other nine countries ranking 2 to 10, which is the case now.

And it would face all of these and it would split the country. No question it would split it. It would split the Republicans because a significant portion of the Republicans are, would go right over the voters, the activists. I don’t know, but the voters would go for that. And that would be a reorganization of American politics.

Is that possible? Yes. Is it probable at this moment? No.

The Problem of Ideological Conformity

GLENN DIESEN: I think some splits would be good to the extent it would accommodate some more intellectual pluralism. I think a key problem, not just the United States, but the political west in general, has been ideology. It created a very intrusive conformity that is, you know, we talk about liberalism, but, you know, it’s been two centuries since David Ricardo made the point that within the capitalist system, and again, he was a liberal economist arguing, you know, one of the key ones, recognizing that over time there’s always concentration in capital over labor.

And this relationship would become more and more unequal as new technologies became more efficient again, the capital owners would begin to dominate is something that would be managed. And you saw the same from John Stuart Mill to Adam Smith, they all, again, even liberal economists recognizing, for example, rent seekers, that this is problematic.

But it seems like under liberal ideology, these people would all advocate for unfettered market forces. It’s. And yeah, this is kind of the ideology which everyone conformed to. I think it’s. If you have some political. I guess the benefits of some political crisis is it allows for some other political forces to emerge.

And if you take that step backwards and have more options in front of you, then possibly, yeah, that is what is required. The problem, of course, is when the status quo has delegitimized itself, it also opens up the political landscape from some very unsavory, dangerous political forces as well. And so it remains to be seen who replaces the delegitimized, exhausted, dysfunctional political powers of the status quo. And yeah, who will actually come and replace them anyways, you know, Glenn, if.

The Plasticity of Ideological Commitment

RICHARD WOLFF: I could very, very briefly, it’s also possible to come at what you just said in a different way. I am struck as a professional economist who had to learn and had to teach free trade ideology many times how easy it has been to basically convert the American people from free trade, globalization, rah, rah, rah, to tariff, tariff protection, tariff protection, evil, other, don’t trade with them.

It is amazing, the plasticity of that ideological commitment. Wow. If you organize and you mobilize, people’s ability to shift really remarkably quickly has also been demonstrated.

GLENN DIESEN: Yeah, sorry. No, that’s a great point. How. Yeah, it didn’t take long for.

RICHARD WOLFF: No, it did not.

GLENN DIESEN: Free made, free trade mantra to be replaced with the celebration of protection.

RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah, and I think a populism from the left could expect if it did its work well, if it mobilized the intellectuals, which it already has half of, and made them do their job in Gramsci’s organic intellectual sense. Well, I think there’s an audience. I know there’s an audience out there in America that is very, very large and full particularly of young people ready and willing to be activists.

GLENN DIESEN: Well, Professor Wolff, thank you so much for your time. It’s always great to speak with you.

RICHARD WOLFF: Okay, same here. Thank you.

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